If you're running a home server, you probably already have your devices backing up their data to your storage pools. But that's not the only place you should be storing backups, as the 3-2-1 backup rule means you should have one copy of your data at an offsite location. That could be a cloud storage service or a physical machine that's further away than your garage, but for any truly important data, it's a necessary cost to keep it safe.

Whether you're running full backups, incremental updates, synced folders, or even some mix of all, having an additional copy of essential data at an offsite location helps you get back on your feet if the worst happens to the data inside your home server. You can do this in a few ways, but these are our favorites.

4 Have a NAS at a family member's house

Send critical backups to a second server hosted in a trusted place

Potentially, the easiest and most cost-effective way to keep your home server backed up to an offsite location is to ask a trusted friend or family member if you can stash an unobtrusive NAS device in their house and run periodic backups to it. Running incremental backups that are scheduled for hours when they won't be using their internet connection is the best bet for not causing issues with their online experience. You can also use Wake-on-LAN to keep the NAS device or file server off until its backup time to save on electricity costs.

Depending on their router equipment, it might be necessary to swap out their ISP router with one that can run WireGuard for connecting to the storage server remotely. That way, you're also able to provide remote tech support for your family members while not being at the whims of the ISP, who might manage to cut off remote access accidentally by sending a router firmware update out.

3 Set up Backblaze

A more economical solution to other cloud storage providers

Storing a backup of your home server's data offsite isn't just about finding a place to store it. It's also about the software that makes the backup process easier, and that's one of the main reasons I like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as an offsite option. You can set up backups for specific folders or files to go securely into the company's storage pods.

Unlike normal cloud storage providers, where if you accidentally delete a file from your home server, it disappears off the cloud drive, Backblaze is a true backup solution. That means the copy in the storage pods will still be there, so you can recover it once you realize your mistake. You get 10GB of storage free, but you'll burn through that pretty quickly if you're backing up a home server. It's only $6 per TB of data per month once you go over the free cap, or you can get 20TB for $1,560 per year. That's more than enough for essential data that you need to be able to access at a moment's notice.

2 Use Amazon Glacier for less-accessed data

For long-term storage of important data

While Backblaze and other cloud storage providers give you always-on access to your backup data, Amazon S3 Glacier storage works a little differently. It has three tiers of storage classes, all with different pricing, with S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval being the most expensive to use. That's because Amazon prices its long-term storage based on how quickly you need to access your data, and if you're only storing backups, it makes more sense to use the cheapest tier.

With S3 Glacier's archival tiers, your data essentially goes into cold storage once you've uploaded it. If you need access to those backups, you submit a request to AWS, and they pull out a temporary copy of it for the duration you specify. This could take minutes on the more expensive tier, or up to 72 hours on the cheapest Deep Archive tier.

It's up to you to decide which data you can live without for up to three days. It's fairly common to use a mix of all three of these options, with backup data that needs immediate access on more expensive but more readily accessible cloud storage tiers and rarely-accessed backups on S3 Glacier.

1 Use cold storage

Backups that nobody can modify are one way to keep critical data safe

The other option for backing up your home server offsite is to run cold storage with a set of hard drives that you put the archival data on to, then move to another location. This has multiple benefits other than being cheaper, as once the drives are purchased, you have no ongoing costs. The biggest might be security, as nobody can access your data if the drives aren't plugged in. You also get more life out of the drives as a result, because they're not turned on and subject to wear.

As long as you pick your drives carefully to begin with, and practice good data integrity methods like running periodic checksums and auditing data you can keep cold storage for a long time. And if you're backing up a home server, you could rotate those drives every so often, so that the data in storage is always fresh, and the drives are not kept unplugged for too long and succumb to things like bit rot.

Having an off-site backup for your home server's most critical data keeps it safe

Keeping one offsite backup for your home server data alongside a second backup on a different machine limits the risk of catastrophic data loss in case of an emergency situation. There are a number of reasons why the data on your home devices could be corrupted or lost, and having a good backup strategy stops you from losing all your files and pictures if the worst happens. You can use any of these methods, or some combination of all four, to ensure your backups survive disaster.